Hong Kong Restaurant

restaurant is closed....phone out of service as of 11-03-12  when i tried to c

My family and I have been frequent visitors to Hong Kong for many many years - this place use to be called Ming Chou Chow Mein for a long time and perhaps 5 years or so ago it was changed to Hong Kong - not sure if owners changed or what.

In any event - we have always enjoyed the food here - on first glance it appears as a little hole in the wall place - which it basically is - but the food is very very tasty.

We typically get the Chicken Subgum Chow Mein, Pork Fried Rice, Egg Foo Young - and all are very tasty.  The prices are very reasonable and it seems to have a good bunch of regulars that visit the place.

This is not a place that you'd eat in at - the dining room is very small and you typically only see people using it during lunch hours weekdays.  

Many asian places just don't appeal to me for your basic chinese food - but this place has been a favorite for 15+ years for our family.

Let me preface this by saying that I was pretty hungry when I got take-out from this place.  It's a tiny hole-in-the-wall in a little strip mall near the Mall of America. No, really, the place was tiny.  There were only 2 or 3 tables total.  They had ONE copy of the take-out menu that they had put into sheet protectors.  Their menu was very limited so don't come here expecting tons of options.  I was nervous when I saw what the place actually looked like, but the food smelled good and it was cheap.  I really wanted some rice noodles - chow fun, chow mei fun, anything along those lines.  The only noodles they had, though, was lo mein.  Lo mein is my least favorite kind of noodles, but lo mein is better than no noodles at all so I ordered the shrimp lo mein (extra spicy).  The rest of the family got sweet & sour shrimp, veggie fried rice, and cream cheese puffs.  The sweet & sour shrimp was pretty good - the sauce was a little too sweet for my taste, but the batter for the shrimp tasted very good.  The veggie fried rice was also good.  One of the better veggie fried rice dishes I've had - not too greasy, nice amount of veggies.  The cream cheese puffs were decent.  They were a little skimpy on the cream cheese, but they were better than the ones at Red Pepper.  Now for the lo mein.  It was not extra spicy.  It was barely spicy.  The woman who owns the restaurant told me that they make their lo mein differently from other restaurants and I saw what she meant when I tasted it.  The lo mein was thinner than the usual lo mein noodles.  It also had a unique Vietnamese soup (canh) taste to it - as if they used soup broth to cook the lo mein.  I had a hard time deciding if I actually liked it or not because it was so different from what I've ever had.  The shrimp in the lo mein was a bad idea.  The shrimp were big, but it seemed like they were added after all the lo mein had been prepared.  The lo mein had a stronger than usual taste thanks to the soup broth and the shrimp were too plain with them.  I ended up separating the shrimp from the lo mein and eating the shrimp by themselves when I was done eating the noodles and veggies.  I would be willing to visit this place again and maybe try some of their other menu items, but it's not a place that I'm ga-ga over.